Something Forever
by Rivkah Gevinson from Chicago, IL
Emma and I hastily drove to Chicago a month ago today. During the week before that, I was doing a bit of writing about photography and escaping, about how photographing lets me keep something forever, while also escaping my immediate reality (immersing in my surroundings but leaving behind my "self", or the opposite: immersing in my internal world via a viewfinder). I am often feeling these two contradicting desires: to stay forever and to leave immediately.
Later that week, Emma and I spent 24 hours weighing our options and finally decided we'd stay in Brooklyn, and an hour later decided we'd go to Chicago, and one more hour after that we had packed her car and were driving away. Driving that day on the wide and empty roads (Brooklyn's opposite) I felt things in such an essential way, like my world had boiled down to a focus (but not just my world, everyone's world. The whole world's worlds!). I wanted to feel safe, I wanted to be close to the people and elements I love, and I was scared of the big unknown.
As I do not personally know anyone who has been very sick, I have been mostly dwelling on the circumstances of being so internal - the whole world being internal - against the backdrop of one terrible thing which has enveloped the whole world, and which causes one to die a fast death, but one long enough to be lonely. The contrasts all feel so stark. Things feel so essential, but in the way that variety has vanished from our lives, things also feel extremely banal.
I have been going back into my old photos: sifting through old prints stored in the basement, compiling a portfolio that is related to this escaping/keeping thing, and especially thinking of my recent photo projects: how they are about not fully being where you are even though you can't escape walls/furniture/zip code, but more being deep in a non-place of longing and yearning, of looking out of the window, of feeling on the outside, of being two selves: the body that is in the space, and the inside of the body which wants to be anywhere-but-here. The inside/outside staying/leaving theme is, of course, feeling present.
